4of13Project MercuryDate: 1958-1963Mission: Put an American into Earth's orbit before the Soviet Union.Cost in 2017 dollars: $2.13 billionSource: The Space ReviewPhoto: NASA

5of13Project GeminiDate: 1962-1967Mission: Develop technology and practice maneuvers that would be used to go to the moon.Cost in 2017 dollars: $9.4 billionSource: The Space ReviewPhoto: Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

6of13Project ApolloDate: 1961-1972Mission: Land the first humans on the moon.Cost in 2017 dollars: $162.4 billionSource: The Space ReviewPhoto: NEIL ARMSTRONG, HO

An amateur astronomer recently stumbled onto an 18-year-old NASA satellite that scientists lost contact with more than a decade ago.

IMAGE, or the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, was launched in 2000 to study the impact of solar weather on Earth's magnetosphere. It did its job dutifully until December 2005 when NASA scientists were suddenly unable to communicate with the satellite.

Now, thanks to Scott Tilley's satellite-observing astronomy blog, NASA employees are hard at work dusting off old software and records in an attempt to reach and possibly work with the long-lost $150 million satellite once again, reports Science.

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Tilley originally discovered the satellite after hunting for ZUMA, a classified U.S. government spacecraft or satellite shrouded in secrecy that launched into orbit with SpaceX earlier this month.

Instead of finding evidence of ZUMA, Tilley found himself tracking signals from the IMAGE satellite.

Tilley believes his accidental discovery, as well as the subsequent joint efforts of scientist all over the world to examine the so-called "zombie satellite," could serve as a study for future space salvage operations.